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By Leila on February 3, 2012

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
The Verbal Artistry of Julius Malema
From the Anthro News Blog Language and Culture Column:

Guest Columnist
Steven P. Black

Steven P. Black, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

In November of 2011, political youth leader Julius Malema was suspended from the ruling party of South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC, once a primary force of organized resistance to the racist and oppressive governance known as Apartheid, refashioned itself with the guidance of Nelson Mandela into a party for non-racial government. Though the ANC is officially committed to non-racial democracy, not all of the party’s prominent members share the color-blind perspective, especially when it comes to finding blame for current social ills like incredibly high crime rates, HIV infection, poverty and inequality. Julius Malema, a vocal opponent of white liberalism in South Africa, was found guilty of bringing the ANC into disrepute. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15671960 ]. This ruling was significant, given that in previous years Malema was touted by the current South African president Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders as the future leader of South Africa.

The post-apartheid constitution recognizes eleven official languages: Afrikaans (the 16th century Dutch derived language most associated with apartheid), English, and nine indigenous languages including IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Setswana, Sesotho, and Northern Sesotho. Malema grew up speaking a variety of Northern Sesotho called Pedi but likely had some or even a great deal of exposure to English and Afrikaans in his schooling and possibly at home. In present day South Africa, English is a lingua franca spoken by politicians, civil servants and is seen as the language of international economic development. In everyday life, many black South Africans speak multiple indigenous languages, English, and Afrikaans often codeswitching between two or three languages or speaking a variety called Flaitaal or Tsotsitaal—a variety referred to in linguistics as a “creole” language for its combination of these multiple indigenous and European language varieties. Malema, like other politicians, most often speaks publicly in English, but sometimes uses reference to his “home language” (in local parlance) to make a point about supposedly “traditional” African values. For instance, when the biological sex of a world champion black South African sprinter was in doubt, Malema responded, “Hermaphrodite? What is that? Somebody tell me, what is Hermaphrodite in Pedi? There’s no such thing, hermaphrodite, in Pedi.”

Malema is notable for his divisive rhetoric in English that singles out white South Africans as the cause of the majority of the nations ills. Malema’s words are also derogatory towards other non-black racial groups (especially Indian South Africans) and towards women. A less commented upon element of Malema’s work is the verbal artistry with which he has been able to concentrate his vehemence into quotable sound bytes.

“‘Racism is the legacy of De Klerk. Unemployment is the legacy of De Klerk. Shortage of houses is the legacy of De Klerk. De Klerk must never be compared with Mandela,’ in January 2011 urging people not to credit South Africa’s last white ruler, FW de Klerk, for releasing Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990.”

This statement is remarkable in its ability to communicate a complex affective and epistemic stance in a compact, fluid form. Here he connects De Klerk to racism, unemployment, and housing shortages. The use of the word “legacy” indicates a presupposition, shared and assumed but never spoken, that De Klerk is to be associated with Apartheid itself and not with the end of Apartheid. Scholars of verbal art will recognize the parallelism of Malema’s words. The phrase, “is the legacy of De Klerk” is a frame, while “ ‘racism’, ‘unemployment’, and ‘shortage of houses’ are the foci of parallel syntactic constructions. It seems fair to call this verbal art—Malema performs in front of an audience, bears heightened responsibility for his talk, and is employing parallelism—noted by linguist Roman Jakobson as a key linguistic form by which verbal art can be distinguished from everyday speech.

I had initially thought that looking at the actual videos from which this and other quotes were taken would demonstrate the ways that media recontextualization cleaned up a speech full of pauses, corrections, and perhaps less eloquent speaking. Watching Malema speak, though, I was struck by the force and charisma with which he crafted his words. Still, I will note that, as always, media recontextualization of Malema’s words involved a great deal of erasure. For instance, here is a quote from the recording linked above:

“We have decided to forgive De Klerk, but we don’t forget what he, Botha or Verwoerd and many others did to the people of South Africa.”

This does not negate the many ways in which Malema has indeed brought the ANC into “disrepute” through his oppositional, divisive and prejudiced speeches, but it does highlight an instance where he may have attempted to soften the rhetorical force of this talk. It may be that Malema is a victim of his own verbal artistry. These abilities have helped him to galvanize support among young black South Africans, especially those who feel that the country has not come far enough in its seventeen years of legislated equality. However, his verbal virtuosity coupled with his political platform has also incited contempt and anger among many white South Africans. Though the ANC does not depend on the votes of white South Africans, the country does depend on the continued financial participation of some of its most wealthy citizens as well as investment and aid from Europe and the United States. This has been an ongoing concern of the ANC since taking power (in contrast to South Africa’s much maligned and bankrupt neighbor to the north, Zimbabwe). In the end, since the progressive constitution does not allow the ANC to silence Malema, the organization is attempting to do the next best thing—to disavow any part in the co-authoring of his talk.

Editors of Language and Culture Column: Leila Monaghan, leila.monaghan (at) gmail.com; Jacqueline Messing, jmessing (at) usf.edu; Richard Senghas, richard.senghas (at) sonoma.edu

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Call for Submissions, AAA 2012

By SLA Web Guru on January 23, 2012

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

 

It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting, which will be held this year in San Francisco, California, November 14-18.  This year’s theme is: “Borders and Crossings”.  As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters.  We are also including the call for submissions for graduate student papers for the SLA’s Annual Student Essay Prize; please take a look at that call if you are a graduate student.  Below I have included the information that you should need to submit your proposals.

 

Invited Sessions:  March 15 deadline

The first deadline is for the submission of proposals for invited sessions.  All proposals should be submitted directly to the AAA site.  The website will be open for submission beginning February 15; the deadline for final submissions is March 15.  The invited session proposal requires a complete list of presenters and a panel abstract (500 words). Ideally, each presenter will also submit his or her abstract as well (250 words).  In the past, panels which include both session and paper abstracts have been ranked more highly, as the submission reviewers are better able to assess the panel as a whole.  We are particularly interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme.

 

As in the past, all panels submitted for invited status by March 15 will be reviewed and ranked by a panel of reviewers.  (If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please get in touch with me.)  All AAA sections receive a set number of invited session slots; last year we had three invited sessions on the program.  Co-sponsored sessions are one way to spread those slots further by sharing the time allotment with another section; please indicate on your proposal if there is another section that might be interested in co-sponsoring your proposed invited session.

 

Notifications will be made by April 4.  Panels which are not accepted for invited session status will be automatically rolled over into volunteered session submissions (those submissions can be altered on the AAA website, if desired, between April 4 and April 15).  Those panels which are accepted will have until the April 15th deadline to finalize their submissions on the AAA website.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about your proposal, but do remember: all submission must be made to the AAA website – if you just send them to us, then they are not officially submitted.

 

Volunteered sessions, individual papers, individual posters:  April 15 deadline

Proposals for volunteered sessions, individual papers, and individual posters must be submitted to the AAA website by April 15.

 

Graduate Student Paper Prize Competition:  March 15 deadline

Due to the success of last year’s Graduate Student Paper Prize roundtable at the AAA, we will be including another roundtable in the program this year (note, the undergraduate student paper prize competition is not affected by this and will be announced as usual).  The SLA is calling for graduate students to submit papers to the section by March 15th; the winner and finalists will then be invited to participate in an SLA-sponsored workshop at the 2012 AAA meetings in San Francisco, along with two senior linguistic anthropologists (to be announced), to conduct a discussion based on the papers’ research results.  In order to be eligible for the award, the applicant must have been a graduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.  The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of clarity, significance to the field, and substantive contribution.  The paper should be suitable for submission to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and must not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography.  At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

 

The paper must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format by the March 15 deadline.  It should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh, SLA Member at Large (at the email below).  The cover sheet should include the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.   Please contact Jillian Cavanaugh with any questions: jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

 

General information and other thoughts:

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology would like to encourage panel organizers to make use of the SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org .  We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress.  This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest.  The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit
http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

 

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats.  Sessions can be one of two lengths: 1.75 hours or 3.75 hours.  While all of the 15-minute time slots in the sessions must be scheduled, the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation in the way that they are used.  We also encourage submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

 

The AAA adheres to a very strict “one paper/one other role” rule.  A person can give one paper and be a discussant or be a chair. Organizer/chair counts as one role in the same session.  No exceptions; one paper plus one other role. Participation in special events like chairing a business meeting or leading a workshop are not included in this calculation.

 

The organizer of a volunteered session MUST be clear in directing the session to a particular section for review, and the same goes for authors of volunteered papers.  Similarly, if you would like a session to be considered for co-sponsorship, be sure to include all interested sections for review.  If session organizers or authors are in doubt as to where their proposals will be best received, please contact all of the relevant section program editors for preliminary assessments before completing your submission.

 

Session organizers must check the progress of the session to make sure each participant registers and/or submits a paper/poster by April 15. If a participant role is incomplete -either by not registering or by not submitting an abstract – the participant will not appear as part of their session in the preliminary or final program.

 

If a panel includes a non-anthropologist, this person may apply to have the Association membership waived but must still pay the meeting registration fee.  The non-member (not the organizer of the panel) can apply for the waiver when they go through the submission process.

 

Please contact me if you have any questions (jahlers@csusm.edu).  I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Jocelyn Ahlers
Chair, SLA Program Committee

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On Free Will

By Chad Nilep on January 14, 2012

Socrates: Is man possessed of free will?

Karl Smith: Free will is an illusion. Although we have a conception of what it means, there are human experiences that are inconsistent with this conception.

Socrates: For example?

Smith: If we sever your corpus callosum and show a card to your left eye saying “touch you nose”, you will likely touch your nose. If I ask you why you touched your nose, you may say that you acted of free will, since you are not consciously aware of having read the card.

Socrates: So what we conceive of as free will is really something else?

Smith: Some neuroscientists suggest that what we think of as our conscious selves is actually a collection of neurological, cognitive, and social structures that initiate, moderate, or control our decisions.

Socrates: I see. By the way, how did you come to the academy today?

Smith: I drove my car.

Socrates: Your car is an illusion. What we think of as your car is actually a collection of engine, drive train, transmission, and auto-body parts that collaborate to cause locomotion. I’ve been taking an auto repair course at the Y.

Smith: Your new understanding of engines doesn’t mean I don’t have a car. It simply means that you understand and can talk about my car in a new, more sophisticated manner.

Socrates: I see. Now, what were you saying about free will?

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Research Works Act – H.R. 3699

By Chad Nilep on January 13, 2012

A bill known as the “Research Works Act”, H.R. 3699, was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2011. The Association of American Publishers applauded the bill, but some scholarly publishers have expressed opposition. This post provides a brief summary of the bill and statements in support and opposition from publishers and others.

The Library of Congress’s excellent THOMAS site provides the full text of the bill here. The text of the bill is short, and Section 2 gives a clear description of the intended outcome.

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

  1. causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
  2. requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

In other words, there will be no requirement that federally-funded research be included in open-access archives. These archives are essentially online databases where academic papers or other content are available for free to anyone who cares to read or use them. Examples include arXiv, which archives papers in physics, mathematics, and other sciences, and PubMed Central, which archives papers in medicine and the life sciences.

H.R. 3699 appears to be a response to the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy and the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). In 2008 NIH adopted a policy requiring all papers from research it funds to be deposited at PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. The Federal Research Public Access Act (H.R. 5037), a bill introduced in 2009 and currently referred to subcommittee, would require all federal agencies to adopt similar policies for research that receives more that $100 million in federal support.

Supporters of H.R. 3699, including the Association of American Publishers, argue that open access should be available only where authors and other involved parties agree to participate, and should not be mandated by government agencies. In a similar, but not directly related vein people such as Kent Anderson at Scholarly Kitchen have argued that academic publishing, including for-profit publishing, makes scientific knowledge available at reasonable prices to the few people who can understand it, and that money pays for valuable services.

Carolyn Maloney, co-sponsor of the bill with Representative Darrell Issa, says, “The purpose of HR 3699 is to support the continued investment and innovation by private-sector publishers in scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journal articles and to advance the public interest in the important peer-review publishing system that helps ensure the quality and integrity of scientific research.”

Opponents of H.R. 3699, including M.I.T. Press, ITHAKA (which publishes JSTOR), Pennsylvania State University Press, and the University of California Press, suggest that the bill may conflict with their missions to bring scholarly work to the broadest possible audience. (It should also be noted that these publishers are all members of AAP, and although they disagree with the group’s position on this issue, they will continue that participation.)

Anthropologist and open-access activist Jason Baird Jackson suggests that the goal of this bill is to support a status quo that benefits relatively affluent groups at the expense of poorer ones.

The American Libraries Association says that the NIH Public Access Policy and FRPAA ensure timely access to research. ALA and others argue that research funded by tax dollars should be free to all citizens. At Savage Minds, Alex Golub compares journal subscriptions to toll booths on government-built roads and suggests that H.R. 3699 is an attempt to stop the removal of those tolls.

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Year-end Roundup

By Chad Nilep on December 28, 2011

There are just a few more days until the new year. The coming new year is a great time for new beginnings – and that gives me a ready excuse for not having written any sort of inaugural posting as the in-coming digital content editor yet.

Look for news on updates to the SLA site and other digital media in the new year.

In the meantime, enjoy this year-end roundup of ling-anth related stories.

Word (etc.) of the year.

The American Dialect Society will select its Word of the Year on January 6th at their annual meeting, held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.
[UPDATE 1/8/2012: The winner is occupy.]

Already, though, Stanford linguist and radio commentator Geoff Nunberg has selected his word of the year (occupy), Merriam-Webster has announced its choice (pragmatic), and the Oxford English Dictionary has anointed squeezed middle.

That last selection sparked an interesting debate between Geoffrey Pullum and Ben Zimmer at Language Log on whether the “word of the year” needs to be a word.

Also, and relatedly, at Language Log, Victor Mair has posts on the Chinese and Japanese characters of the year, with comments on the nature of the writing systems, and the ways that people misunderstand or misrepresent them.

 I can haz language play

A video of a presentation by Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughn on the grammar and indexicality of lolcats has appeared on several language-related blogs and other sites over the past few weeks. (Teh Internets is nothing if not dialogic.) In case you missed it, here it is at Gawne’s blog, Superlingo.

A muscular empathy

I can’t think of an elegant way to bring this around to the themes of language or year-ending, but I have been thinking about this piece from The Atlantic’s Ta-Neshi Coates since I read it.

If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”

It is definitely relevant to ideas of cultural relativity, agency versus structure, cross-cultural (mis)understanding, and other issues in linguistic anthropology.

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Educating Tibetans in Tibetan?

By Leila on December 23, 2011

A Fork in the Chinese Road: Educating Tibetans in Tibetan?

Susan D. Blum
December 23, 2011

Earlier this month a Tibetan monk set himself on fire. It was the twelfth incidence of Tibetan self-immolation by a monk or nun since March, according to unverified but plausible reports. These acts of desperation continue a long line of protests in China despite the Chinese government’s unyielding determination to keep Tibetans in line. What is called by protestors “cultural genocide” has many dimensions, not the least of which is language. When people’s religion, subsistence, and very language are attacked as unworthy, there are limits. And China is reaching such a limit in Tibet, no matter how determined it is to maintain its firm grasp in the name of “development.”

In October 2010 North Americans briefly became aware of China’s intention to educate Tibetans in Mandarin instead of Tibetan. Headlines described protests by students, teachers, and parents who belong to Qinghai province’s large Tibetan population, and who mobilized on behalf of the Tibetan language. China retrenched a bit; by November it said it would wait until “conditions are ripe” to change the language of instruction. This is a worthy concession.

As with all things Chinese and Tibetan, the situation is more complicated than it seems. And, though US anthropologists may like to read our own struggles with bilingual education and our so-called English-only legislation onto China’s language policies, there are profound and instructive differences in the two nations’ approaches to multilingualism and multiculturalism. In contrast to increasing state and federal efforts to legislate a single dominant national language (in November 2010 Oklahoma became the 31st state to make English its official language; my own state of Indiana is attempting to join in) China’s very constitution recognizes multilingualism. It has signed international covenants guaranteeing various rights for minority nationalities, including the right to use their own languages and scripts. Beyond that, China has the ambitious goal of producing trilingual and triliterate minority citizens: for Tibetans, that would mean literacy and proficiency in Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Eventually.

Like every country, though, policy and practice are not always identical.

The actual situation facing China’s 5.4 million Tibetans (about half in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the rest scattered throughout an area adjacent to Tibet—in total an area as large as the continental United States) is that China has an assortment of subtle policies, with parallel bilingual education, transitional bilingual education, and more. The aims may be read variously, as well-intentioned attempts to improve the economic situation of the minorities, or as diabolical determined destruction of Tibetan culture, and every position in between.

China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities (nationalities), adding up to slightly less than 10% of China’s total population, are largely poor and generally have educational attainment rates significantly below those of the majority (with some exceptions, such as the Korean minority). Thus, education of minorities is a critical issue in improving equality within China. China has been attempting to address this in ways that aim for a kind of national unity that does not require assimilation of minorities. It is a delicate dance and, as Walker Connor puts it, “pity the policy makers.”

In the sixty-three years of the People’s Republic of China, perhaps half a billion people have been lifted from poverty. National average illiteracy and semi-illiteracy rates for people 15 years and above were 22.21% in the 1990 census, and had fallen to only 9.08% in the 2000 census. China has just conducted a new census, and rates are likely to have fallen even further. In the last four years alone, China has dedicated some of its enormous wealth in part to creating what it calls a “harmonious society,” aiming to eradicate some of the extreme differences between the poorest and richest segments of its population, usually corresponding to rural and urban, minority and majority, people. Its educational ambitions are extraordinary: In the last decades, higher education has risen to include nearly a quarter of young people, up from single-digit levels (and now giving rise to something they are calling “over-education,” as many college graduates are unable to find employment). China produces more scientists and engineers than any other nation. China is to be commended for these achievements.

Given China’s commitment to improvements in education, it would be ideal if it took advantage of an unprecedented opportunity with regard to the Tibetan and other minority peoples coexisting with the majority (Han). Given its stated commitment to minority freedom to use their own language, education is one of the main domains in which minority policy is played out in practice. The variety of language used is negotiated every time anyone speaks, but policies shape those intimate interactions, for example by determining which teachers, with what linguistic repertoire, to place in which classrooms.

China is facing a fork in the road to further development. As a cultural and linguistic anthropologist with knowledge of cross-cultural approaches to language and identity, I believe the best route would be to retain and even increase education in minority languages. The other, i.e., one that forces young Tibetans and other able students to choose between loyalty to their own heritage and the promise of success in a single national language, contradicts China’s constitution, and would have a negative impact on those students.

Anthropologists and linguists have demonstrated for a century on the one hand the close connection between language and culture and on the other the value of linguacultural diversity. Like biodiversity, once lost, it cannot be regained. (The only universally agreed-upon case of successful language revival is Hebrew, but there are special political and religious reasons for that.) Half the world’s languages have disappeared in the last century, and predictions for the next century are equally or more dire. In enshrining rights for minority language use in its constitution, China diverges from US policies. While in the United States we are firm believers in “subtractive bilingualism”—the erroneous idea that when a second (or third) language is added, something from the first language is lost. China does not generally hold such an idea. In this sense, I applaud China’s policies and believe that the United States could profitably learn from them.

Preservation of minority languages worldwide is always a financial and logistical challenge, particularly when teaching materials must be developed for sometimes “small” languages without much written history. When countries agree to “rights,” scholarship and funding have to be up to the challenge. In the case of Tibetan, there is no need to begin afresh with materials. Tibetan has been a written language since the seventh century and has a glorious textual tradition. Its heritage of scientific, philosophical, and religious education is sophisticated and nuanced. If a new generation of leaders does not employ this language in its full range of uses, the language will eventually become impoverished and endangered, like so many other languages.

Another notable way China’s lingacultural policies differ from those of the United States is in boarding schools. The United States (and Canada) once sent Native American children to boarding schools, where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. In the name of “progress,” they were wrenched from their families and made into “good Christian Americans.” Our government has finally apologized to those who were often traumatized for life as they had to choose between their parents and teachers, between their Native selves and their student selves.

For a variety of practical but sometimes ideological reasons, China already takes many of the most promising young Tibetans from their isolated home regions and boards them in special schools in what used to be called “China Proper.” There, they are exposed to modern education—as well as surrounded by all the symbols of China’s domination of what used to be a proud Tibetan society.

Research shows, though, that the students are generally pleased with their schooling. They almost universally expect to return to Tibet, where they will become teachers and officials. Their Tibetan identity remains strong, with the exception that they tend to lose their belief in Tibetan religion, taking on the official view that it is “superstition.” One complaint focuses on their Tibetan language skills, which tend to suffer because they are trained largely by Chinese teachers. When they return to Tibet, they must re-learn their language.

Qinghai, the site of last October’s protests, is not Tibet, but is one of the four provinces outside Tibet (along with Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu) where substantial numbers of Tibetans reside. The question of how best to teach Tibetan children to become genuinely bi- and trilingual users of language in educational contexts, is a practical and researchable question. Some questions will be familiar from the US context: At what level of school should children be expected to function in the national language? How good are the teaching materials—and methods—in the minority language? How well trained are the teachers? Are there adequate numbers of bilingual teachers? Given that the nation-wide university entrance exam is conducted in Chinese, how early do students have to be educated in Chinese to have a hope of gaining admission into higher education?

China’s leaders have shown increasing commitment to preserving biological and ecological diversity in the last few years. I urge them to use some of their unprecedented wealth to demonstrate world leadership in the support of Tibetan students. Educating them in Tibetan and Mandarin will require huge investments in training teachers, in developing educational materials, and in bringing new schools to rural herding populations, but the returns are incalculable. There is no dispute that any child expecting to succeed in China must be proficient in Chinese. But there is no limit, cognitively or emotionally, to the number of languages a person can learn. Bilinguals and trilinguals feel themselves enriched by knowledge of more than one form of expression and build strong connections to speakers of other languages. China could do what has never before been done—just as it has in architecture and economic growth. It could honor its commitments to multiculturalism and create a system of education tailored to the conditions of its people. For Tibetans, that means demonstrating, not just mouthing, respect for its splendid cultural and linguistic heritage. It has signed documents claiming it will do so. Now I urge it to conduct the research that will help it genuinely carry out its promises.

And the US could learn some lessons here. We don’t even have policies honoring cultural and linguistic heritage.

Sources
AFP. 2010. “China Defends Language Reform after Tibet Protests.” October 22.http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gqzpIUnmBrUQRC_63QPR9i_w_xgw?docId=CNG.9e74cfb2f42a7af7ec1ac10ddafec467.611.

Arana, Gabriel. 2010. “Linguistic Oppression, There and Here.” The American Prospect. October 22. http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=10&year=2010&base_name=linguistic_oppression.

Bangsbo, Ellen. 2008. “Schooling for Knowledge and Cultural Survival: Tibetan Community Schools in Nomadic Herding Areas.” Educational Review 60 (1): 69-84. DOI: 10.1080/00131910701794598.

BBC. 2011. “Tibet ex-monk dies after self-immolation, activists say.” December 9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-16111709.

Bodeen, Christoper. 2010. “China Defends Language Policies in Tibetan Areas.” Associated Press. October 22.http://www.salon.com/wires/allwires/2010/10/22/D9J15NNG0_as_china_tibet.

CIA World Factbook. 2010. “China.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html.

Connor, Walker. 2009. “Mandarins, Marxists, and Minorities.” In Zhou, Minglang and Ann Maxwell Hill, eds. 2009. Affirmative Action in China and the U.S.: A Dialogue on Inequality and Minority Education, pp. 27-46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Krishnan, Ananth. 2010. “China to Reconsider Language Policy.” The Hindu. October 24. http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/artaicle845240.ece.

Lundberg, Maria. 2009. “Regional National Autonomy and Minority Language Rights in the PRC.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 2009 16 (3): 399-422. DOI 10.1163/138819009X1247494197674.

Ma, Rong. 2007. “Bilingual Education for China’s Ethnic Minorities.” Translated by William Crawford. Chinese Education and Society 40 (2): 9-25. DOI 10.2753/CED1061-1932400201.

Phayul. 2010. “20 Tibetan Students Detained, Protests over Language Continue in Tibet.” October 25. http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=28417&article=20+Tibetan+students+detained%2C+protests+over+language+continue+in+Tibet

Postiglione, Gerard A. 1998. “State Schooling and Ethnicity in China: The Rise or Demise of Multiculturalism?” Paper Presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Montreal.

Postiglione, Gerard A. 2008. “Making Tibetans in China: The Educational Challenges of Harmonious Multiculturalism.” Educational Review 60 (1): 1-20. DOI: 10.1080/00131910701794481.

Postiglione, Gerard A. 2009. “Dislocated Education: The Case of Tibet.” Comparative Education Review 53 (4): 483-512.

Postiglione, Gerard A., Ben Jiao, and Ngawang Tsering. 2009. “Tibetan Student Perspectives on Neidi Schools.” In Zhou, Minglang and Ann Maxwell Hill, eds. 2009. Affirmative Action in China and the U.S.: A Dialogue on Inequality and Minority Education, pp. 127-142. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Postiglione, Gerard, Zhu Zhiyong, and Ben Jiao. 2004. “From Ethnic Segregation to Impact Integration: State Schooling and Identity Construction for Rural Tibetans.” Asian Ethnicity 5 (2): 195-217. DOI: 10.1080/1463136042000221889.

Richburg, Keith B. 2011. “A 12th self-immolation, first in Tibet proper, poses test for China.” Washington Post with Foreign Policy (December 2). http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/a-12th-self-immolation-first-in-tibet-proper-poses-test-for-china/2011/12/02/gIQAbNIJKO_story.html.

State Council [of China], Ministry of Education. 2006. “National Report on Universal Education in China (November 2005).” Translated by William Crawford. Chinese Education and Society 39 (6): 67-95.

Sun Baicai and Qi Jinyu. 2007. “Development of Ethnic Education and Educational Equality in China: A Statistical Analysis Based on the Two Recent Population Censuses.” Front. Educ. China 2 (4): 528-535. DOI 10.1007/s11516-007-0039-2. Originally published in Minzu Jiaoyu Yanjiu. 2006 (5): 16-20.

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Wang, Chengzhi, and Quanhou Zhou. 2003. “Minority Education in China: From State’s Preferential Policies to Dislocated Tibetan Schools.” Education Studies 29 (1): 85-104. DOI: 10.1080/035569022000042516.

Wang Shiyong. 2007. “The Failure of Education in Preparing Tibetans for Market Participation.” Asian Ethnicity 8 (2): 131 – 148. DOI: 10.1080/14631360701406262.

Wong, Edward. 2010. “China: Teachers Sign Petition in Support of Tibetan Language.” The New York Times. October 25.

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Yang, Jenny. 2010. “Tibetan Students Protest Being Taught Only in Chinese.” The Epoch Times. October 24. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/44778/ .

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Occupying Language

By Leila on December 22, 2011

H. Samy Alim writing in the NY Times about “What if We Occupied Language?”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/what-if-we-occupied-language/

When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy, ” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to continue to promote the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation — a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land.

Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.

As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.

In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Word Committee, noted on NPR’s “On the Media” that the meaning of occupy has changed dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. “It’s almost always been used as a transitive verb,” Zimmer said. “That’s a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It’s being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it’s this very flexible word now that’s filling many grammatical slots in the language.”

What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like? We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.

Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.

For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.

Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”

Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term “illegals” and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.’s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.

But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against “Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services.” In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak “English with an accent” (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized “accents” as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an “accent” to receive equal opportunities.

In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.

As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint.

H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, “Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.,” written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.

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Languages of Christmas

By Leila on December 18, 2011

Three Kings

Three Kings (c) memorialchristianchurch.com

From my University of Wyoming Colleague Paul Flesher. Comments on this piece and the languages of Channukah and other holidays most welcome!

Happy holidays to you all,

Leila

UW Religion Today Column for Week of Dec. 18-24: Speaking Internationally: The Languages of Joseph, Mary and the Wise Men

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December 14, 2011 — By Paul V.M. Flesher
The stories of Jesus’ birth are stories of travel. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph travel through the national territory, from Nazareth in Jewish Galilee to Bethlehem in Jewish Judea.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the travel is international. The tale begins with the wise men traveling from the “East.” They visit King Herod to ask for directions and then bring gifts to Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Bethlehem. After they leave, an angel sends Joseph and his family to Egypt, where they live until Herod’s death.
So with all this international travel, how did the travelers communicate? What languages did they speak at home and abroad? Our answer to this question lies in understanding the languages spoken in Palestine and the extent to which they would have been used in the East and in Egypt.
Linguistically, Palestine was a cosmopolitan region in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. As a strip of land less than 75 miles wide on the eastern Mediterranean shore, Palestine often found itself between empires or swallowed up by one. Whether it was Egypt or Mesopotamia, or Persia, Greece or Rome, these imperial powers moved across Palestine, warred on its territory, and often absorbed Palestine into their territories.
So although Hebrew was the Jews’ native language, by the time of Jesus’ birth, they had centuries of experience with both Aramaic and Greek. Babylonia and Persia had brought them Aramaic as early as the eighth century B.C. When Alexander the Great conquered Palestine in 332 B.C., Greek became the imperial language. When the Romans arrived in 63 B.C., Greek retained its dominant role.
Both Persia and Alexander conquered wide swaths of territory beyond Palestine, ranging from Egypt to modern day Iraq and Iran far to the east. So all the conversations in the nativity story should have happened in Greek, right? Greek was the most recent language, it was used in Palestine, Egypt and the “East,” and had been around for several centuries. Seems obvious.
If only it were so simple.
In the highly stratified societies of the ancient world, language did not change at the same speed at all social levels. The elite and educated classes learned a new imperial language most quickly, because the conquerors, who were relatively few in number, used them to rule the conquered country. The next group to pick up a new language was the traders and other business people, while the last was the peasants. Their fixed tie to their farms usually required interaction with the rulers only at tax-collecting time, and then probably through their own countrymen.
This was the main pattern of language acquisition for both Aramaic and Greek in this region. But after Alexander, a new linguistic development took place. As the elites learned Greek, Aramaic became the language of resistance. Among the lower classes, Aramaic was already in the process of replacing their native languages and this process continued until it was the lingua franca not just of Palestine but of all the eastern Mediterranean countries.
Apparently the upper classes retained Aramaic as well, for the inscriptions and documents of private individuals or local communities unearthed by archaeologists in this region are in Aramaic more frequently than in Greek. The elite may have spoken Greek to their conquerors, but they spoke Aramaic at home.
So when the upper-class “wise men” talked with King Herod, presumably in his Jerusalem palace, they probably conversed in the official language of Greek.
But when they arrived in Bethlehem, they most likely spoke the same language that Joseph and Mary were using with the local villagers, namely, Aramaic. As a carpenter, Joseph belonged to the artisan classes rather than the peasants, but the nationalist character that Aramaic had taken on would have made this his primary language.
So what language did Joseph and Mary speak in Egypt? Probably Aramaic. For the same phenomenon of linguistic resistance among the lower classes took place in Egypt as well as Palestine. Joseph and his family would have lived among the lower classes while they were in Egypt, and so would not have had any connection to the elite circles where Greek would have been the language of conversation.
This fits with the gospel’s portrayal of the adult Jesus. Although the gospels are written in Greek, the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean, when they depict Jesus speaking in his native language-as in his final words on the cross-he speaks Aramaic.
Flesher is director of UW’s Religious Studies Program. Past columns and more information about the program can be found on the Web at www.uwyo.edu/relstds . To comment on this column, visit http://religion-today.blogspot.com .

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Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, UNC Charlotte

By SLA Web Guru on December 10, 2011

The Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte seeks applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level, beginning August 2012. Ph.D. required at time of appointment.

We seek a broadly trained sociolinguistic anthropologist with a strong research agenda who can teach a 4-field Introduction to Anthropology, Intercultural Communication, and electives to a diverse student body.

Other desired (but not required) qualifications are: a) experience in applied or public anthropology; b) geographic focus in the Middle East or China; c) experience related to digital humanities (using digital resources in teaching and research).

The Department of Anthropology grants B.A. and M.A. degrees in both general and applied anthropology concentrations. UNC Charlotte is a growing urban research institution in the largest metropolitan area between Washington DC and Atlanta. More information about the department can be found at http://anthropology.uncc.edu/. More information about Charlotte can be found at http://geoearth.uncc.edu/About-Charlotte/about-charlotte.html.

Applications will be accepted only through the university’s automated application site: https://jobs.uncc.edu. Search under ”Faculty” for ”Assistant Professor in Linguistic Anthropology.”

Please submit a curriculum vitae, a letter of application relating your qualifications to the requirements for the position, and the contact information for at least three references.

Review of applications will begin 30 January 2012 and continue until the position is filled. Later in the process, we may contact you and ask you to submit additional materials, including graduate transcripts, letters of recommendation, and writing samples.

For more information, please contact Professor Gregory Starrett at gsstarre@uncc.edu or Professor Janet Levy at jelevy@uncc.edu.

The UNC Charlotte College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is committed to developing an inclusive environment where diversity in all its forms is valued and incorporated in the full range of College activities. See also: http://clas-diversity.uncc.edu. This position is subject to a criminal background check.

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Executive order on Native American Language Revitalization

By Chad Nilep on December 7, 2011

The Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation is carrying out a letter-writing campaign to urge President Obama to sign an executive order drafted by White House staff and Native American leaders. According to the LSA-CELP, “U.S. government agencies would be directed to ensure that their policies, procedures, and functions support community-based language revitalization. It would compel governmental agencies to follow through on the promises of the Native American Languages Act and the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act.” (PDF poster here)

Although neither the LSA-CELP poster nor their Take Action! web page specify the content of the executive order, I believe that this draft, from the Linguistic Society of America’s documents, is the order in question. (If not, the current draft is probably similar.)

That draft order declares that it is the policy of the United States to allow Native Americans to protect and preserve Native American languages. It orders federal agencies to identify current policies that may conflict with the Native American Languages Act of 1990 (PDF of the law from the National Association for Bilingual Education) and to propose rule changes to ameliorate the conflict. The order would also create an Interagency Working Group on Native American Language Revitalization.

Conflicts tend to occur in education policy, where laws passed to promote the use and learning of English can impinge on Native American languages and other minority languages.

Link roundup:
LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation
LSA “talking points” for letters on this issue (DOCX format)
Chad Nilep’s personal reflection, “Who speaks Shoshone, and when?”

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